Chapter 14
DOYLE
Harvest broke the second week of October and ran twenty-six days, and that's the real thing, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
From the tenth to about the fifth of November I worked six-fifteen in the morning to nine at night.
Two nights I didn't come home at all. On the twenty-second the north leg's motor went and I was up there in the dark with a work light and a man from the co-op in the next county until half past two in the morning.
Not one hour of it touched that list. There was nothing to touch. The paper's on the refrigerator. It says at least one a year, on the calendar in ink in January, and it says no item touched alone. There was no item in October and no item in November, so harvest was harvest. It was my job.
Iris ran her route through the whole of it.
Eleven houses every Thursday, in the rain on the sixteenth and the first hard frost on the thirtieth.
She left a plate in the oven for me every night.
On the twenty-second, the night the motor went, she brought two thermoses and a bag of sandwiches out to the elevator at eleven o'clock, handed them up to me on the platform, and went home without saying anything except "the far one's coffee.
" That's what I had the whole nine years.
I used to be able to turn my job into a wall, which is a thing I worked out somewhere on those tower stairs.
Harvest was always standing right there, ready to be the reason for anything I didn't want to look at, and the awful part is that it's a good reason.
That's what made it work. In October I had nothing to hide behind it, so it was just corn.
I went to see Lonnie the second Sunday in November, once it was over.
He'd stopped coming by — six weeks of it.
He'd been at the elevator, we'd worked the same yard, he'd handed me a wrench and taken it back, but he hadn't set foot in my kitchen since the day I made that phone call, and my brother has been in my kitchen every other Sunday of his adult life.
He was in his garage with the auger, which is where he goes.
"Sit down," I said.
"I'm working."
"Lonnie."
He put the wrench down and sat on the cooler.
"You told Iris to tell me to do the list. That was six weeks ago. I've been letting it sit because I didn't know what to say, and that's the same thing I did for nine years, so I quit."
He wouldn't look at me.
"Say it," I said.
"There's nothing to say. You did it, not me."
"Say the other thing."
He rubbed his thumb along the seam of his jeans a while.
"Nine years," he said. "Nine years I've been telling people my brother and me do stuff together.
That's my — Doyle, that's the thing I've got.
Marcy's gone, the kids are in three states.
Somebody at church says what've you been up to, and that's what I've got.
Me and my brother went out to the canyon.
Me and my brother went up in a balloon."
"I know."
"And it turns out I was where you went so you wouldn't have to go with your wife.
" He said it to the floor. "I liked every one of those trips better than anything that's happened to me since Marcy died, and now I can't have any of them, because every one of them's got a woman standing outside of it. "
I didn't tell him it wasn't like that. It was like that.
"The canyon was the best week of my life," he said. "That's not your fault, that's just where I'm at. I've had it nine years and now I've got to know what it was."
"It was two things. That's what I've got for you and I've thought about it a lot. It was me hiding, and it was you and me on a mule trail. It was really both. The hiding doesn't cancel the other one, and the other one doesn't excuse the hiding."
"That's convenient."
"It's not convenient, it's just true. You want me to say it was nothing? I'm not going to lie to you to make you feel worse. We had a hell of a week. And I paid for it with something that wasn't mine, and you didn't know, and now you do, and that part's mine to carry, not yours."
He sat there on the cooler. "You could've told me. Nine years, you could've said one time, hey, this is on a list I made with Iris. I'd have said take her. Doyle, I'd have driven you to the airport."
"I know you would've."
"So why?"
"Because you don't ask me hard questions." That's what Iris got out of me and I figured I owed him the same. "You're easy to be with. That's not an insult, it's the best thing about you. But easy to be with is what I was shopping for."
Lonnie got up and went and looked out the garage door at nothing for a while.
"Come to Thanksgiving," I said. "There's going to be a coin flip and it's going to be stupid."
"A what?"
"Just come."
He walked me out to the truck, and at the door he started in about Pug being after him about a place up on the Fork — turkey camp, a whole week in April — and stopped in the middle of it like he'd heard his own voice from outside the garage.
"Forget it," he said.
"Lonnie."
"No, I'm not — I don't know what I'm allowed to say to you now."
I stood there with my hand on the door and didn't have an answer for him. Two months on what I owed my wife. Not one minute on what I'd done to my brother's mouth.
"Say whatever you want," I said. "I might have to say something back you don't like."
"That's new."
"Yeah."
He came.
The other thing happened at my own table on a Wednesday, about ten days before Thanksgiving.
Iris had the pad out — she'd started keeping the terms sheet folded in her appointment book, which meant she was carrying it on the route, which meant that woman was reading it in driveways.
She had four candidate slips going for the flip, two of hers and two of mine, and she was making me actually think about mine instead of writing down whatever.
"Fifteen," she said. "The train."
"Overnight."
"In a bed, that's what it says." She was writing. "It'd be two nights and a couple thousand dollars by the time you're done, and it's the kind of thing you'd have to book in — what, spring? For fall?"
"Two thousand dollars is?—"
I heard it. Not before it and not after. In the middle, with the rest of the sentence already loaded and coming. I put both hands flat on the table.
"The rim's talking," I said.
Iris stopped writing. For one second I thought she was going to pick that slip up and tear it in half; she had hold of the corner of it.
Then she set the pen down very carefully, the way she sets down her shears, and sat back in the chair, and said nothing at all for what felt like a minute and was probably fifteen seconds.
"You were four words in," she said.
"I know."
"That's not before it finds a shape, Doyle. That's after. That's you standing in the doorway of it."
"I know."
"So what was it?"
"Money."
"And?"
"And I don't — " I had to stop. That night I had about a third of it.
"It's not words. That's what I'm trying to tell you.
It doesn't come at you in words, it's a letting-go in the chest, it's relief showing up early.
Then the words come along and hang themselves on it, and by the time you can hear them they sound like a normal thing a man says about a train ticket. "
"Which words."
"Let's see where we're at in January."
She sat there. "That's the exact sentence."
"I know it is."
"That's the sentence from six years ago about the cave."
"I know it is."
She got up and went to the sink and ran water into the kettle and then didn't put it on the stove, just stood there holding it. "I need a minute."
"Okay."
"I'm not going to be nice to you about this tonight," she said, with her back to me. "That's not part of it. I said I wouldn't hold it against you and I won't, and I meant that, and right now I'm doing it on purpose, which is a different thing from not minding."
"That's fair."
"It's not fair. It's what I've got."
She stood at that sink a long while, and I sat at the table with four slips of paper in front of me and didn't say one word, because everything I had was some version of asking her to come back over. When she finally sat down she didn't pick the pen back up.
"Do we have two thousand dollars?"
"We'd have to plan it. Yeah. We had six-fifty for a fishing school on a Wednesday in July."
"That's right," she said. "We did."
"So it stays in."
"It stays in." She wrote it on the slip, and her handwriting was worse than it usually is. Then she folded it, put it with the others, got up, and went in the front room and turned the television on.
I sat in that kitchen another twenty minutes. I'd had it in my head that saying it would be the hard part, that once it was out of my mouth we'd look at the thing together and it would be over. It wasn't over. It cost her the evening. She went to bed at nine without the crossword.
Around eleven, in the dark, she said, "Doyle."
"Yeah."
"Say it earlier next time."
"I'll try."
"Don't try. Four words is too many." She turned over. "But you said it, and I'm not going to pretend that's nothing, because I'm not stupid, and a man who was managing me would have finished the sentence and I'd never have known there was anything in it. So."
I lay there and took it. It was more than I had coming.
The last thing I did that month I did on a Saturday afternoon while she was on a call with Nate in the other room.
I took the frame off the nail, set it on the table, got the back off the way we'd done it in October, and got my pen out of my shirt.
There's about an inch of yellow paper below line twenty, below Get old doing all this, where the margin runs out, and I wrote one line down there, small, in my hand, with no number in front of it, because it isn't mine to number.
Take I. back to the bridge when we're too old to do the ridge, just the bridge, and sit.?
The question mark's on there because it isn't decided.
It's an ask, and it's the first one I've made on that piece of paper since I was forty-two years old.
I put it where she'd find it, put the back on, hung it up, and went out to the garage.
Stacked wood an hour and a half. Did not come back in and say look what I did.
She'd see it or she wouldn't, and if she saw it, she'd ask.
I put a question on a wall in my own house and went outside to wait on being asked.